Religion

October 19, 2016

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about Eric Metaxas's egregious misuse of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology in order to condemn liberal, pro-gay and lesbian Christians, arguing that these Christians, rather than the anti-gay conservative evangelicals that are Metaxas's gravy train, were akin to Nazis. At the time, I ended my post with these words: "So now, let us finally be done with Eric Metaxas. May I never have to hear his name or discuss his "work" ever again."

Alas, this was not to be. As Metaxas has spent the last few years capitalizing on his absolutely abysmal, morally bankrupt, and historically inaccurate biography of Bonhoeffer in order to cement his place as a conservative Christian public intellectual. It would be bad enough if he had simply written a poor biography and then moved on. But having positioned himself now as a go-to "Bonhoeffer scholar," he sees fit to invoke Bonhoeffer's legacy in the name of whatever ax he happens to be grinding at the particular moment (as in the above case of Christianity and homosexuality).

And now, it's come to this: Metaxas has now decided to thoroughly sully both his own, barely salvageable to begin with, reputation, and the legacy of a genuinely great Christian theologian and moral exemplar by arguing that Bonhoeffer's theology should lead Christians to support Donald Trump. No really. This was his argument.

In The Wall Street Journal he recently wrote the following:

The anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer also did things most Christians of his day were disgusted by. He most infamously joined a plot to kill the head of his government. He was horrified by it, but he did it nonetheless because he knew that to stay "morally pure" would allow the murder of millions to continue. Doing nothing or merely "praying" was not an option. He understood that God was merciful, and that even if his actions were wrong, God saw his heart and could forgive him. But he knew he must act.

Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer knew it was an audience of One to whom they would ultimately answer. And He asks, "What did you do to the least of these?"

It's a fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the country's chance to have a Supreme Court that values the Constitution -- and the genuine liberty and self-government for which millions have died -- is gone. Not for four years, or eight, but forever. Many say Mr. Trump can't be trusted to deliver on this score, but Mrs. Clinton certainly can be trusted in the opposite direction. For our kids and grandkids, are we not obliged to take our best shot at this? Shall we sit on our hands and refuse to choose?

If imperiously flouting the rules by having a private server endangered American lives and secrets and may lead to more deaths, if she cynically deleted thousands of emails, and if her foreign-policy judgment led to the rise of Islamic State, won't refusing to vote make me responsible for those suffering as a result of these things? How do I squirm out of this horrific conundrum? It's unavoidable: We who can vote must answer to God for these people, whom He loves. We are indeed our brothers' and sisters' keepers.

We would be responsible for passively electing someone who champions the abomination of partial-birth abortion, someone who is celebrated by an organization that sells baby parts. We already live in a country where judges force bakers, florists and photographers to violate their consciences and faith -- and Mrs. Clinton has zealously ratified this. If we believe this ends with bakers and photographers, we are horribly mistaken. No matter your faith or lack of faith, this statist view of America will dramatically affect you and your children.

For many of us, this is very painful, pulling the lever for someone many think odious. But please consider this: A votefor Donald Trump is not necessarily a votefor Donald Trump himself. It is a votefor those who will be affected by the results of this election. Not to vote is to vote. God will not hold us guiltless.

It is hard to underestimate how genuinely horrific this argument is. Leaving aside the rehashing of numerous distortions of Hillary's record, the argument boils down to: Hillary is wrong on abortion and gays, so Bonhoeffer would have us vote for a crypto-fascist, racist, misogynist, islamophobic buffoon with no impulse control, no knowledge of anything regarding public policy, ominous ties to Russia, and a demonstrated penchant to lie constantly without any provocation whatsoever.

It's worth nothing that Metaxas mentions abortion only in passing (and, in the process, bears false witness against Planned Parenthood by accusing them of "selling baby parts" -- a widely debunked lie), and then proceeds to his real agenda: Fear of TEH GAY. This is all couched in the language of "genuine liberty and self-government" which he claims will be "gone forever" if Hillary Clinton has a chance to ... what? Appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court? Really? Or more judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Really? The Notorious RBG is the greatest threat to our democracy? Somehow Metaxas has convinced himself that if Hillary Clinton gets to appoint one or more Supreme Court justices this will be, despite every rational indication otherwise, the complete and utter end of the American experiment. Having to give equal treatment in public accommodation to gay couples will lead to the gas chambers, apparently.

And, lest you think that Metaxas doesn't really make that kind of equivalency. Here is what he tweeted* mere hours ago:

The fascistic globalism of HRC/Obama is similar to the threat that German fascist nationalism was in Bonhoeffer's day. Both are anti-God.

As an alternative, he not only proposes Trump, but indeed argues that Bonhoeffer would support Trump. And Bonhoeffer, he argues, would support Trump because Bonhoeffer knew that we all ultimately are answerable to God. Never mind that Bonhoeffer spoke out against the Nazis early precisely because of the kind of racist rhetoric that Trump uses toward Mexicans and Muslims. Never mind that Trump's authoritarianism and disdain for democratic processes, even to the point of threatening to jail his political opponents, would have reminded Bonhoeffer chillingly of Germany in the 1930s. Never mind that Trump's desire to control and punish the press would look a lot, if he got away with it, like similar events with which Bonhoeffer was directly familiar. Never mind Trump's connections to the alt-right movement which explicitly connects itself to Nazism. Never mind that Donald Trump embodies quite literally the opposite of everything Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood for. Leave all of that aside. Metaxas is appropriating Bonhoeffer in order to further argue that God wants us to vote for Donald Trump!

Bad enough as it is to see Metaxas continue to stain the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it's even worse to see him do so in order to argue for a privileged Metaxas-only pipeline into the mind of God. Bonhoeffer was never, never so arrogant as to claim he knew what God demanded of him. On the contrary, much of his personal struggle was precisely about the moral ambiguity of determining what he should do as an individual of conscience in the absence of such knowledge. He participated in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler not because he thought that God was demanding it of him, but in spite of the fact that everything he knew about the Christian tradition impelled him in the opposite direction. He did so because he felt the burden of responsibility in the face of God's silence and his own knowledge of just how bad the Nazis were. He was determined to stand before God, not with clean hands, but with the knowledge that he could face God's judgement knowing he had acted responsibly on behalf of those who could not act for themselves, unwilling to hide his dirty hands.

Clearly Metaxas has elevated the perceived threat of a Hillary Clinton presidency to such a level in his own mind that he believes the struggle to elect Donald Trump is equivalent to the struggle of the Confessing Church against the Nazis. But that's a transparently ridiculous claim. And making it requires a complete distortion of Bonhoeffer's legacy. On the other hand, if Hillary isn't Hitler, neither really is Trump -- Despite his authoritarianism, despite his racism, despite his xenophobia, despite the violence of his followers. He is, at worst, a down market Silvio Berlusconi, more of a fool and a travesty than an actual threat. Nevertheless, to attempt to deploy Bonhoeffer in order to argue that God is commanding us to support such a clod, despite the fact that he stands in opposition to everything we know Bonhoeffer stood for, it's more than simply a shame. It's an insult, and it demands action.

Therefore, Eric Metaxas, in the name of all who value the theology and the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I hereby revoke your Bonhoeffer privileges! And may God have mercy on your soul.

*Interestingly, it turns out that Eric Metaxas has blocked me on Twitter, which I find terribly amusing, since I don't think I ever tagged him in anything, and didn't even follow him on Twitter. I guess it was a preemptive blocking, just in case I ever decided to call him again on his total nonsense and horrible misuse of Bonhoeffer.

May 29, 2016

Building on my piece from yesterday, a great deal of my objection to the idea of having certain speakers on university campuses was rooted in the idea that, given the university's mission as a place where ideas can be debated and discussed, and where those ideas can advance intellectual inquiry, a speaker whose sole motivation was to offend others was not appropriate for a university setting. The response I got, initially on Twitter, but also in other contexts as well, was "well, who are you to judge whether it was intended to offend?" Or "Isn't offense in the eye of the beholder?" To which I have typically responded: "I believe it is possible to infer the intent to offend based on the record of the speaker." In other words, from what was known about Milo, and what was known about his rhetoric, and the substance-free nature of the writing in which that rhetoric was typically contained, it was possible to infer that his sole motivation was to offend a substantial portion of the student population. I would extend that argument to the group that invited him: I think we can infer from their invitation to Milo that their entire motivation was to offend the progressive student groups that they knew would show up to protest the event.

Certainly the fact that Milo's events had been protested in a similar way at other venues suggests that everyone involved knew what the likely outcome was going to be. I'd suggest it was exactly what they were hoping for. But I want to expand the conversation beyond this particular speaker on this particular occasion and ask whether or not we can be permitted to infer the intent to offend, generally speaking.

My point here is not whether we can know that people are, as a matter of fact, likely to be offended by a particular speaker. I'm not suggesting that the mere fact that people could be offended is a reason to bar a particular speaker. On the contrary, as I noted before, I think that speakers of all positions on the left-right spectrum, whose views may happen to offend some portion of the student population, certainly have a place as speakers in a university setting. For example, I believe that a pro-choice speaker should be permitted to speak at a Catholic university, even though many Catholic would be offended by them, because the argument about abortion itself has merit, and having that argument in the midst of university life is part of the mission of the university. Similarly, I believe that a speaker advocating building a Trump-style border wall on the American-Mexican border should be permitted to speak, as that argument is part of the larger debate about immigration reform in the United States. I think in either case, it should be unsurprising if protestors showed up, and as in the case of Milo's event, I think it would be ill-advised if those protestors disrupted the event, but protest is certainly an appropriate response.

My question runs to a more difficult issue: To what degree are we permitted to infer that, when someone says something offensive, they are saying solely to offend, versus saying something for the purpose of advancing an important conversation which just happens to offend? The person advocating for abortion rights may indeed offend pro-life Catholics, but that would be in the context of advocating a point of view about the rights of women over their own bodies. Compare that to a speaker who was invited to a Catholic university for the purpose of trampling on a consecrated communion wafer. The later speaker would clearly have no goal except to offend Catholics, and I think it would be well within the purview of the university to exclude them.

Similarly, in the case of the advocate of the border wall, while their viewpoint would be offensive to many, and certainly to me, as long as it was not couched in an argument that Mexicans are in some way innately inferior human beings, but in say economic terms, then offensive as it would be, it wouldn't be solely offensive. On the other hand, inviting a member of the Aryan Nations to campus would clearly have no other purpose but to inflame anger and cause offense to people of color around campus.

Again, if you know what someone's record of speech and action is, I believe it is entirely possible to infer intent from action, and to infer future intent from past action. We do it all the time. A substantial part of human interaction in every context involves the inference of internal states from external actions. Much of human language is about negotiating the differences between what people say and what they intend. And of course, as imperfect creatures, we often get that wrong. But I would suggest that we get these things wrong most in ambiguous, marginal cases where what is being communicated is unclear, or the connection between external act and internal state appears to conflict. But again, to use the communion wafer example: Someone who came to campus for the express purpose of doing that would leave no ambiguity with regard to their goal of offending.

But then the rejoinder would no doubt be: Well shouldn't people have the right to act in an explicitly offensive manner? On the one hand, in your own home, I suppose you can act as offensively as you want. If you can find people who are willing to pay for you to be offensive, you can take the show on the road. If you set up your soap box in a public park, you can be as offensive as you please as long as you obey park rules. But that's not what a university exists to promote. If you are offensive because you are presenting controversial ideas that are otherwise of worth in advancing the intellectual mission of the school, then a university can and should permit that to take place. But no one has a right to be offensive in the context of a university setting, even when presenting controversial ideas. To put it another way: If someone is presenting an idea I disagree with, then it is not a refutation of their idea for me simply to say that I find it offensive. However, if a person is acting in such a way that they are advancing no real idea, but simply trying to get a rise out of me, then to respond by saying "You are simply being offensive" is indeed a refutation. It's saying, effectively, "You are not advocating an idea that is capable of response or rejoinder, but simply trying to be offensive for offensiveness's sake."

Take the communion wafer example again. Let's give the example some detail. Suppose I were to invite a member of the Church of Satan to campus to advocate for the idea that religion was false, that would be an acceptable speaker for a university setting, even a Catholic university setting. But if, as an illustration of his contempt for religion, he pulled out a communion wafer and trampled on it, that would cross the line to pure offense. It is entirely possible to make the anti-religion argument without the offensive act. And making that argument may indeed offend some people. The simple fact that the speaker is from the Church of Satan may offend some people. But those things are offensive in the context of advancing a conversation that is part of the university's mission. The trampling of the communion wafer, on the other hand, is not.

To push it a step further. If we knew that the particular speaker was in the habit of coming to campuses in order to trample communion wafers, then I would argue that it would be perfectly acceptable to say that the speaker was not welcome, because we, once more, can infer his intent to offend based upon what we know he had done in the past.

Next question: suppose our communion-trampler somehow bypassed the university administration and got invited anyway. When word got out, a group of Catholic students decided to protest the speaker, and what's more, some of them decided that they were going to interfere with the speakers act of wafer-trampling. What would we say about their actions? I honestly am not 100% sure. Would the university president have apologized to the member of the Church of Satan if those students succeeded in shutting down the event? I don't know. What I do know is that the problem started when the decision was made to invite the speaker who was known for committing such an act.

As I've argued elsewhere, given the substance-free nature of Milo's offensive rhetoric, and given the demonstrated tendency of his followers to respond to his opponents via intimidation, I believe that the original sin in this entire drama was the decision to allow him to speak at DePaul in the first place. I think it was entirely possible to infer his intent to offend based upon his past actions, and that those actions gave a good indication of what was likely to happen.

What university policies should exist to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future? I admit I am not sure. Where should the precise boundary be between acceptable and unacceptable speakers? I'm not sure about that either. I'm not even 100% sure that Milo fell on the wrong side of that line, though as I've argued, I have a strong suspicion that he does. But I do think that ultimately we should recognize that not every speaker is acceptable in the context of a university, and determining which are, and which aren't, is part of the university's mission.

April 14, 2016

Earlier this week, a Federal District Court ruled that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (CFSM) should not be considered a religion under U.S. law. According to an article on the ruling by the Religion News Service, this was based upon the fact that the Church was clearly intended to be satire, and not anything that could be considered a "genuine" religion.

In a 16-page decision, the U.S. District Court of Nebraska ruled that Pastafarianism is satire, not sacred, and that anyone who thinks it is a religion has made an error “of basic reading comprehension.”

“This is not a question of theology,” the ruling reads in part. “The FSM Gospel is plainly a work of satire, meant to entertain while making a pointed political statement. To read it as religious doctrine would be little different from grounding a ‘religious exercise’ on any other work of fiction.”

What I find interesting in the ruling is the fact that it makes a clear demarcation between something that is transparently satirical, and what would commonly be considered "genuine" faith. It raises a number of sticky issues, not least of which is "how can one go about distinguishing "genuine" from "inauthentic" religion. However, I don't think that the problem is nearly as difficult as the ruling's detractors are seeking to make it.

In the view of the CFSM's supporters, it is impossible to distinguish between a "real" religion and the CFSM, since everything that appears absurd about that faith is, in their estimation, no less absurd than the doctrines of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, or Scientology. By ruling against Pastafarianism (as the church is sometimes referred to), they argue that the court is making declarations about what constitutes "true" versus "false" religion.

However, that's not how I read the situation. The question is not whether the object of the religion is true or false, but whether the belief in the object of religious faith is sincerely held by adherents. The problem isn't that there is no Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's that absolutely no one really believes that there is one. As an act of satire, the CFSM has done its job too well. It has set itself up as such a transparent attempt to troll genuine religious belief, that no one can possibly take it seriously as a religious faith, to the extent that, even if someone were to claim to believe it sincerely, it would be quite clear that this is simply part of the act. (And if you don't believe me, try listening to or reading someone affirm the doctrines of Pastafarianism without conveying an obvious smirk).

This is in distinction from, say Scientology, which I have in the past defended as an "authentic" religion. By this I do not mean that I believe its doctrines to be true, or even remotely plausible. Rather, in thinking of Scientology as a religion, I recognize that there are many people who, for better or for worse, hold it as a sincere matter of faith. Now, I have heard from former Scientologists that much of the leadership of the Church is corrupt and abusive. This is probably completely true. I've heard enough similar reports to grant that a high degree of probability. But it's irrelevant to the question of whether it constitutes an authentic religion, because again, it's not about the truth or falsity of the doctrines, it's about the sincerity with which they are held. It's not about the virtuousness of the church's leadership, it's about the degree to which they are genuinely held in esteem by their followers, or can at least make a credible case that they are.

And this is the problem with the CFSM. One respondent in a conversation about this asked "why must it be the case that a belief is held sincerely in order for a religion to be authentic," to which I responded, "because the very nature of the word "belief" implied the idea that the thing believed is sincerely held to be true. There is simply no such thing as a genuine "belief" which is not sincerely held. Since nobody claiming to hold to the beliefs of the CFSM has been able to make even the most basic case that they hold those beliefs sincerely, it cannot be considered to a genuine religion. It's too successful as an act of satire. If the CFSM had wanted to be held as an actual religion, it would have had to do a better job cultivating a base of followers that could credibly claim that they sincerely believe it.

This, to be clear, has nothing to do with the question of whether one can "prove" the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster any more than one can "prove" the existence of God. The response that the FSM is just as credible as the Christian or Muslim God is, from a legal perspective, beside the point. This is not a matter of philosophical proof or comparative theology. It's a matter of what the courts often call the "reasonable person test." Would a reasonable person, looking at the CFSM conclude that its adherents held its beliefs sincerely, or merely for the purposes of satire. On that basis, I think a court could validly conclude that the CFSM is not a religion because it's precepts are not sincerely held.

Now, there may be other grounds on which one could make a case for the validity of the CFSM as a religion, but I'm of the opinion that, as New Religious Movements go, it's really not very interesting precisely because it's so obviously satirical. What I'd be interested in seeing would be a case where, for example, someone who followed the Jedi religion wanted that to be officially recognized. There are, after all, those who hold that Jedi-ism is a genuine religious belief, and they hold it sincerely. I think one could make a very compelling case, in a way that one can't for the CFSM in favor of adherents of Jedi religion, on much the same grounds as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Scientology.

December 22, 2015

Benjamin Dueholm has a piece inReligion Dispatches today that adds a bit more to the ongoing Wheaton College controversy over whether Christians and Muslims worship the "same God." A few points that he raises are worth accenting. First, on the subject of how "monotheism" has traditionally functioned in Christian theology, he writes:

To some extent this may reflect the relative decline of classical philosophical monotheism in Christian discourse. Aquinas and his non-Christian influences had a common language for the nature of God—one, transcendent, necessary, eternal, not subject to change or decay, and so on. This language was at one time believed to be logically prior to revelation, and to be valid even if no revelation had confirmed it (this led thinkers of all three faiths into some risky territory with their co-religionists).

Moreover there were aspects of the revelations themselves—the “book” of which Dr. Hawkins spoke, quoting a common Islamic formula for the adherents of the monotheistic religions—that cohered in broadly shared themes. The world has an origin and a conclusion; humans are made for relationship with God; moral precepts are ordered to the knowledge and service of this God.

This philosophical language and these intertextual themes are less prominent in Christian thought today, especially among Protestants.

This point cannot be stressed enough. The theological positivism represented by way that Wheaton's administration has chosen to interpret Professor Hawkins' statements represents a failure to recognize the continuity of tradition in thinking about the question of monotheism. What Medieval Catholic theologians and Medieval Muslim scholars shared in common with one another allowed them to actually argue over the substance of their theological claims. These scholars were actually having a disagreement, whereas Wheaton College can't actually be said to be "disagreeing" with anyone because it's refusing to even engage in a substantive conversation with Islam over the nature of its differences. The best that can come -- the best -- from a religious dispute of this sort is a set of mutually dueling monologues, in which religious traditions talk past one another and refuse to recognize any common ground from which they can speak. Of course, the more common result of this refusal to engage on a set of common terms is violence, coming from both sides in the dispute. But if the goal of speech is understanding, then recognizing a common language for conversation is a necessary first step. We once had that in the conversation between Christians and Muslims, but we don't any longer.

Ben goes on to make another point:

Where Christianity’s similarities with the monotheisms—whether of Greeks, Jews, or Muslims—were once central to Christian interfaith apologetics, now it is the distinctive marks that predominate. Some evangelicals have adopted a sort of slogan that Christianity is “not a religion but a relationship,” fully severing the anguished familial bonds with Judaism and Islam.

In other circles it is now more common to describe religion as constituted by its practices and its distinctive narratives, diminishing the abstract notion of God to something of a cipher.

This point is even more perplexing to me coming from an evangelical institution such as Wheaton. Given the focus on conversion, and the need for apologetics, the fact that they would abandon what has been, since Paul's speech at the Areopagus, the central apologetic strategy of Christianity is really rather mind-boggling. It also raises troubling questions, as several commentators have noted, about the relationship between evangelical Christians and Jews, suggesting as it does that they do not believe that Jews worship the same God as Christians any more than Muslims do. As Daniel Kirk has noted, throwing around accusations of Marcionism is a bit of a cottage industry these days, yet I cannot be the only one to find traces of Marcionism in this implication. I was rather startled in my own exchanges over the past several days on this topic to realize that many Christians are actually quite happy to abandon the claim that Christians and Jews worship the same God, if that means that they don't have to accept that Muslims worship the same God as well.

But what this demonstrates is how the commitment to the exclusion of Muslims has led to an incoherent and tribalistic rhetoric in some evangelical circles, where evangelism simply consists of responding to every question with a Bible verse (as though that would convince anyone who didn't already hold the Bible as authoritative in some way, and as though those passages themselves don't require contextualization and interpretation), and where there is not even a scintilla of rational engagement with those with whom we disagree, or even an acknowledgment of a shared language. The problem is not, I think, that there are some people who just can't be bothered to rationally engage on these questions. There will always be people whose capacity and desire for such engagement is limited. The problem is that those who can't be bothered occupy positions of power and influence in educational institutions intended to represent the Christian intellectual tradition at its best.

For now at least, Wheaton's administration seems to have decided that it's given up on the business of education, in name of indoctrination. More's the pity for its excellent faculty and students.

December 21, 2015

Much as I've appreciated Miroslav Volf's defense of the argument that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, one passage in his Washington Post article jumped out at me as rather dissonant, but I didn't really feel qualified to comment on it. However, it turns out that my Catholic Theological Union colleague Scott Alexander noticed the same thing, and he is qualified to comment. Here's the passage from Volf:

In addition to contesting the Trinity and the Incarnation, Muslims also contest the Christian claim that God is love — unconditional and indiscriminate love. There is no claim in Islam that God ‘justifies the ungodly’ and no command to love one’s enemies. But these are the signature claims of the Christian faith. Take the redemption of the ungodly and the love of enemy out of the Christian faith, and you un-Christian it.

Clearly, Christians and Muslims disagree, just as Christians and Jews do, on the questions of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Trinity. These are rather basic disagreements, though profound as they are, they do not nullify the underlying argument. Christians and Muslims may be said to worship the same God, even if they disagree about the nature and attributes of that God. However, what about this business about Muslims not believing that God is Love, or that God commands us to love our enemies? Scott Alexander writes in response to these assertions:

My experience with Muslim interlocutors of various types have taught me that, although they may reject the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, Muslims have their own different but equally powerful expressions of God’s love in profound divine-human intimacy.

Muslims personally testify in an abundance of ways to the immanence of God in their lives—the God whose active will is felt in the pulse of the very blood coursing through their veins. This sense of intimacy with a God who loves (His) creation is also echoed in classical interpretations of the two divine attributes attested in Islamic discourse above all others: “The One Who is (Him)self Compassion” and “The One Who Ceaselessly Acts Compassionately in (His) Relationships with All Creatures.”

I discussed this point with a Muslim colleague who pointed out that the Islamic emphasis on God’s rahma or “mercy” is the equivalent of Christian agape in that it is “flows eternally with no expectation of reciprocation.”

Alexander then goes on to address the assertion that Muslims aren't commanded to love their enemies:

In the context of burgeoning Islamophobia in the U.S. and rhetoric which propagates the falsehoods that Islam is an inherently violent faith and that Muslims are uniquely prone to violence in the name of their religion, Volf suddenly resurrects another age-old Christian anti-Muslim polemic. He declares, by way of implicit contrast with Islam, that “love of enemy” is “the signature claim of the Christian faith.”

This highly spurious declaration raises at least two questions.

The first is whether Prof. Volf is familiar with verses such as Q 41:34:

“[Given the fact that] goodness and evil are not equal, defend yourself [against evil] with what is greater in goodness, such that the one between whom and yourself there is enmity may be as though s/he had always been your intimate friend.”

He goes on to ask how any religion can be said to have a singular "central claim," the absence of which would make it cease to be what it is. He then concludes:

Volf seems to imply, Wheaton and other Evangelical Christian institutions and theologians can then get about the more important business of truly loving Muslims by showing them just how flawed their understanding of the God they worship really is.

As a Christian committed to the study of Islam and Christian-Muslim dialogue, I must respectfully offer my “thanks, but no thanks” to Prof. Volf’s well intentioned but ultimately troubling intervention in the controversy over Prof. Hawkins’s suspension.

I'm not as willing to throw over Volf's whole argument because of these flaws, but I do recognize that they are flaws in his argument. What Volf, Alexander, and I all share is a commitment to the creation of an ongoing conversation between Christians and Muslims, which recognizes and addresses the genuine core differences between them, but also engages in an honest assessment of what we share in common. When Volf argues that "Many Christians and many Muslims worship the same God," I understand him to be saying that those of us who recognize God as the common source and originator of our distinct faiths, and affirm that God wishes us to live in peaceful community with one another, then we are worshiping the same God. Of course, by that same argument, it can be said that Christians and Muslims who desire this share more in common with one another than they each do with members of their own faith that are committed, as far too many are, to the perpetuation of violence and conflict.

December 17, 2015

Wheaton College has made the news this week for putting a tenured professor on "administrative leave" for having asserted that Christians and Muslims worship "the same God." Here's a brief account of the details via Inside Higher Ed:

Wheaton College, a Christian institution in Illinois, has suspended Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science who has attracted considerable attention for saying she would wear a hijab throughout Advent to express solidarity with Muslims. A statement from the college said the suspension was not for her wearing the hijab, but because of "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements" she has made. "Wheaton College faculty and staff make a commitment to accept and model our institution's faith foundations with integrity, compassion and theological clarity. As they participate in various causes, it is essential that faculty and staff engage in and speak about public issues in ways that faithfully represent the college's evangelical statement of faith," said the college's statement on the suspension.

The particular statement that got Professor Hawkins into trouble, as described by Christianity Today is this: "“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book, ... And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

There are a number of strands of this controversy which are difficult to unravel. On the one hand, there's the question of academic freedom, in that as a faculty member at a university, Professor Hawkins should be permitted to make statements in her capacity as a professor without fear of institutional reprisal. Yet, at many religiously based colleges and universities today, those rights are to one degree or another curtailed. Yet it undermines Wheaton's credibility as the "Evangelical Harvard" as it claims to be.

Then there is the issue of Professor Hawkins' decision to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslims. Wheaton insists that this was not a factor in their decision. And perhaps it wasn't, but it's hard to disentangle her public display of solidarity from the words she used to express that solidarity. It seems that Wheaton was uncomfortable with the degree to which professor Hawkins was acting "too Muslim" for them. As Miroslav Volf noted in the Washington Post today: "When Hawkins justified her solidarity with Muslims by noting that as a Christian she worships the same God as Muslims, she committed the unpardonable sin of removing the enemy from the category of 'alien' and 'purely evil' other. She also drew attention to the simple fact that most Muslims aren’t enemies."

Then there is the issue of whether Professor Hawkins' defense of her position is "too Catholic" for Wheaton, given the school's history of firing faculty for the "crime" of converting to Catholicism. But at bottom, the school's claim is that she has violated its statement of faith via her assertion that Christians and Muslims worship "the same God." But why should this be controversial?

Certainly there are Christians who are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Christianity has anything at all in common with Islam, as well as those who can't comprehend how Christians and Muslims could worship the same God. However, Islam has always insisted that the God it worships is the God of Abraham, the same God attested to in the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. Thus it places itself firmly in the Abrahamic religious tradition. But the fact that Muslims believe they worship the same God as Christians and Jews doesn't necessarily require that Christians believe that, does it?

Well, Muslims assert that they worship the God who was revealed to Moses and the Prophets, just as Christians and Jews do. They assert that the God they follow is one God, just as Christians and Jews do. In many respects in fact, the way that Islam conceives of God is much closer to the Jewish conception of God than the Jewish conception of God is to the Christian conception of God. If Christians and Jews worship the same God, then in what sense would Muslims not do so?

Indeed, as Professor Hawkins statement notes, this position has been officially recognized within the Catholic Church. According to Nostra Aetate:

“The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth (Cf. St. Gregory VII, Letter III, 21 to Anazir [Al-Nasir], King of Mauretania PL, 148.451A.), who has spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own. Although not acknowledging him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet, his Virgin Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they await the day of judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms-deeds and fasting.

Of course, as noted above, Wheaton has some issues with Catholics as well. But there is certainly nothing alien to the idea that Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship the same God. Of course, this is not the same thing as saying that we understand God in the same way. Our conceptions of God are relevantly similar, but not identical. This is again, clearest when one contrasts the Christian conception of God as one, but also triune, as eternally spirit, but also incarnate in the flesh of Jesus Christ. And in terms of salvation, as Christians we affirm that God saves humanity through Jesus Christ, while both Judaism and Islam believe that it is accomplished through God's law and covenant as attested in the Torah or the Quran. These are deep and relevant differences between these traditions, but acknowledging these differences is quite distinct from saying that each tradition is not, in its own way, seeking to follow the same God.

What's more, if, as many Christians affirm, all truth is one, then anyone seeking to faithfully follow God, whatever tradition they embrace, is following the same God. This position, which was powerfully illustrated by C. S. Lewis in his book The Last Battle implies that one can be mistaken in the substance of one's belief, while still truly following the true God. As Volf states:

All Christians don't worship the same God, and all Muslims don't worship the same God. But I think that Muslims and Christians who embrace the normative traditions of their faith refer to the same object, to the same Being, when they pray, when they worship, when they talk about God. The referent is the same. The description of God is partly different.

A key problem in understanding what is going on at Wheaton has to do with how they understand what it means to "do theology." This is a perennial problem within the evangelical community, and one that I've encountered in conversations with conservative Christians time and again. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: from the conservative Christian perspective, theology is not something that takes place in the context of a particular time and place. It is not a response to the revelation of God. It is not an attempt to engage in an understanding of the tradition to which we belong. Rather, conservative evangelical theology is about obedience to and adherence to authoritative texts, whether those texts from the Bible, particular creeds and confessions, or -- as in this case -- your school's statement of faith. This "received theology," is then declared to represent an uncrossable line, and the decision about who has or has not crossed that line winds up residing with authoritative bodies, like church bodies or university administrations. It constitutes a form of dogmatic theological positivism which does not allow allow any room for actual response to the contextual arena in which God is actually live and moving in the lives of believers.

Contextual theology, by contrast, recognizes that theological work is an ongoing and imperfect project, which takes place in the life of the church, in conversation with tradition and scripture, but always in light of the current situation in which it is being done. What it means to think contextually is to ask the question, as James Gustafson has put it: "What is God enabling and requiring us to do here and now?" This requires us to be open to the leading of God into new situations, to be willing to take risks on behalf of our faith in God, and to act confidently in God's grace when we stumble and fall. While the received, dogmatic theology of conservative evangelicalism is rooted in fear -- specifically fear that God will abandon us if we affirm the wrong propositions about the divine nature -- contextual theology reaches out to new situations in love, acting confidently in the knowledge that "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). Professor Hawkins was engaged in a contextual theology, rooted in love for her Muslim brothers and sisters, and in recognition that, as the God of Jesus Christ was the God of Abraham, both Christians and Muslims must worship the same God. Her response wasn't a rejection of Wheaton's Statement of Faith, but it also wasn't simply a dogmatic adherence to it. Rather, it was a contextualization of that statement in light of what God is enabling and requiring of us today.

In the final analysis, there is no good reason for Christians to assert that Muslims follow any other God than the one God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, even though they do not recognize our account of that revelation, or what we understand it to be telling us about God. What Wheaton has done is shameful, and as Volf notes, has more to do with Professor Hawkins' attempt to "de-other" Muslims, than with any matter of substance having to do with Christian faith or Wheaton's Statement of Faith. Professor Hawkins has done an admirable thing, and by doing so she has drawn attention to the continuing relevance of this key theological question to the ongoing relationship between Christians and Muslims in the United States. More's the pity that there are plenty of Christians around, happily condemning others to hell, who refuse to see the commonality between us and our Muslim brothers and sisters.

December 01, 2015

Rene Girard, the anthropologist and social critic, died shortly before last month's Paris bombings. Today Religion Dispatches reflects on his life and legacy. A key paragraph on the relationship between religion and violence:

For over three decades, scholars of religion have drawn on Girard to inform their work. Christian theologians and New Testament scholars have found Girard’s insights on the scapegoat mechanism of special salience. Girard has argued that myths attest to the scapegoat mechanism from the perspective of persecutors: the victim of mob violence is guilty. By contrast, the Gospels break with myth to present the victim as innocent. Living at a time of social crisis, Jesus is the victim of mob action; but his innocence, attested to by the Gospels, breaks apart the scapegoat mechanism, forever shaking the foundations of a culture built on sacrifice. Even scholars who disagree with Girard about his insights attest to his influence on their work; as a consequence, Girard has had a pervasive impact, especially on scholars who want to understand the dynamics of ritual, the meaning of myth, the origins and history of violence, and the relationship between violence and religion.

For my part, I've always appreciated Giard's ability to interpret and translate the anthropological substance of religious ideas in creative and socially constructive ways. His work has also be extremely useful to me in understanding and interpreting the idea of the atonement in Christian theology. He will be missed.

The recent study on the relative altruism of religious and non-religious children has come in for a bit of criticism since it was released a few months ago, to much fanfare. Initially the reporting on the issue was somewhat breathless (and, among my atheist Facebook friends, kind of gleeful). At the time, I withheld judgment, on the premise that a) pretty quickly some criticisms would emerge and that b) regardless, there's not a lot you can determine on the basis of a single study.

Sure enough, criticism began to emerge relatively quickly, including claims that the study overstates the statistical variance between its religious and non-religious subjects, and that its methodology is unclear. Here, for example, is one critique:

P-values are rotten evidence for anything (click here to learn), (2) Regression is deeply flawed and not what you think (click here, here, or here to learn), (3) Probability models do not prove cause (click here, (4) Asinine studies like this are common (click here) or here). And don’t forget that altruism was not measured, but that kids sticking stickers in envelopes was. How much influence did the researchers have, especially with the younger kids? I mean, did kids stick stickers because they wanted to prove to the whitecoat they were compliant or because they wanted to be liked or because they wanted to share? Altruism forsooth!

Similarly, critics have noted that the central terms being measured in the article -- "religion" and "altruism" -- are themselves notoriously difficult to define. Added to that, there were a great many variables that the researchers did not control for. And again, the researchers apparently did not account for the fact that the bulk of their identified "non-religious" children were all from China:

How do I know all of this? Educated guesswork. I could be wrong. But here’s how the numbers break down: globally, 323 families in the study identified as non-religious. And 219 kids in the study came from China. It is extremely unlikely that more than a handful of the Chinese families identified themselves as Christian or Muslim, and we know for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset did so. Nobody identified as Confucian. Just six families, worldwide, said they were “other.”

By elimination, that leaves around 200 Chinese kids for the non-religious side of the ledger, or around 60% of the total non-religious pool.

So what the study is picking up on as "non-religiousness" may be better described as a quality of the particular sample pool that was predominantly non-religious, that is, Chinese children from the Guangzhou province.

None of this would really matter that much -- because again, you can't determine much from one study under any circumstances -- if the authors did not try to draw sweeping conclusions from it:

“Nonreligious children are more generous,” explained a headline at Science magazine. “It’s not like you have to be highly religious to be a good person,” Decety told Forbes. “Secularity—like having your own laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books—is better for everybody.” Forbes headlined the article “Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists.” (Decety tweeted a link to the piece). In the Forbes interview, Decety cautioned that there would be naysayers, at least among the anti-science crowd. “My guess is they’re just going to deny what I did—they don’t want science, they don’t believe in evolution, they don’t want Darwin to be taught in schools.”

See. Not only are non-religious children more generous, but secularity (defined, helpfully as "reason" over against "holy books") is "better for everybody." And, if you don't believe that this study proves that, it's not because the study is flawed, but because you're the kind of person who doesn't believe in science and wants to ban evolution.

Most of what I've gleaned here comes from an article at Religion Dispatches' The Cubit blog, which deals with issues at the intersection of religion and science. It goes over many of the problems with the study. But I want to stress that I think that the study is suggestive and bears follow up. It could very well be that a better constructed study, that does a better job accounting for independent variables, that has a clearer methodology, a larger sample size, and a more carefully defined central question, could reaffirm what this study does. It actually wouldn't surprise me much, because I don't think that religion of any kind necessarily makes a person better, or that its absence necessarily makes one worse. Religion is one factor among many in the construction of morality, and I'm Augustinian enough to know that sin lurks even in the hearts of the most pious. Yet, that said, I can't help but appreciate the conclusion of the Cubit writer, who writes:

In the past few decades, there has been a sharp divergence between those who study religion from within sociology and the humanities, and those who approach it from the side of social and evolutionary psychology. The humanists and sociologists have moved toward more and more granular snapshots of religious life, leaving behind the old, sweeping Religion is x, y, and z formulations that defined the good old days, when a dude in an office at Oxford could comfortably sketch out a theory of ritual based on secondhand ethnographies from remote tropical islands. Meanwhile, the social and evolutionary psychologists seem to be flying full-tilt in the direction of more and more grand theories of The Role of Religion in All Humanity.

From my semi-neutral post as a journalist who covers both fields, I’d like to suggest that the social and evolutionary psychologists are more full-of-shit than the humanists. The fact that someone like Decety feels comfortable taking his sticker games and making public comments about the fundamental nature of morality and secularity feels slightly surreal. (It’s not just in Forbes interviews. Here’s the final line of the paper: “More generally, [our findings] call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite.”)

The problem is not that Decety and his colleagues’ results aren’t interesting, or even that they’re wrong—for all I know, all the world over, kids who engage more with certain ritual experiences are less kind to their peers.

The problem is that, absent robust evidence for his generalizations about the Nature of all Christians and Muslims, it is difficult to tell where Decety’s grand claims emerge from actual evidence, and where they may owe a debt to politicized beliefs about how religion in general, or specific religious traditions (i.e. Islam), motivate people to do bad things.

November 30, 2015

The Satanic Temple has been in the news a great deal lately. They are the group behind the campaign to get Baphomet statues erected in public spaces around the country, and their leader has been in the news a great deal lately, often quite effectively flummoxing Fox news anchors who can't quite figure out what to make of him. At it's core, the Satanic Temple is a bit of atheist tricksterism, intended to infuriate conservative Christians and promote a thoroughly secular agenda.

Via James McGrath (to whom I am increasingly tempted to simply farm out all of my theo-blogging) I see that there has been some discussion of the so-called "7 Precepts" of the Satanic Temple, and their alleged moral superiority to the 10 Commandments of Judaism and Christianity. Apparently this has gotten some traction in the atheist blogosphere, and James decided to address it himself. The seven precepts, as the Satanic Temple defines them are:

One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.

The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.

One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.

The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo your own.

Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.

People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.

Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

Now, in some ways, this is not a bad starting point for a moral conversation, and I could probably get behind several of the principles on this list. Others would require a bit more discussion or clarification. For example, it's not at all clear to me that "the freedom to offend" is something that I should take at face value as morally permissible, or as something that I'm obligated to "respect." Similarly, it's not clear to me what moral status pertains to conforming our beliefs to science. Certainly that's true of areas that science addresses, but it's not clear to me how broadly that's intended to be applied. And it's not clear that either of these is more morally compelling than "Don't murder," "Don't Steal," "Don't Covet" and "Don't Commit Adultery." However, the general appeal to empathy, compassion, wisdom, and justice is all well and good.

But what's striking about this is how little it has to do with Satan or Satanism. Again, recognizing that the Satanic Temple is attempting to be provocative, it still associates itself with a set of symbols and with a religious movement that is best known for embodying none of those principles. Modern Satanism can be traced back to the formation of the Church of Satan by Aton LaVey in 1966. Certainly you can point to predecessors, such as Alastair Crowley, but any contemporary movement basically has its roots there. But LaVeyan Satanism was created to embody precisely the opposite of the values that the Satanic Temple claims to favor. It's best understood as a religious application of the principles of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- selfishness, hedonism, and the disregard of moral principles such as, for example, justice, empathy, and compassion. It's a sort of symbolically freighted neo-Nietzscheanism. Like LaVey's Church of Satan, the Satanic Temple is atheist, in that they don't believe in God or in a literal spiritual figure of Satan. But there is really nothing else to connect what the Satanic Temple claims to stand for with what is commonly known as Satanism.

Now, far be it from me to tell anyone that they can't call themselves Satanists if they want to. But it's a sort of a strange thing. It would sort of being like saying "Yeah, I'm a Gandhian, except for the non-violence part." Granted, there are a lot of Christians who say essentially that with regard to Jesus: "Sure, I'm a Christian, except for the whole 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' bit." But that's hardly a convincing argument for the use of the term.

But leaving that aside, James makes an important point about the difficulty of translating the morality of the Ten Commandments to a contemporary setting:

The ten commandments are an ancient human invention, not a divine one. The same goes for Satan, who emerges from a figure with the title “the Accuser” (ha-Satan in Hebrew) and develops into a rebellious angel, before becoming a figure who stands as a symbol for individualist and capitalist selfishness in the hands of Anton LaVey, and more recently as a teacher of empathy and compassion in the hands of The Satanic Temple.

Figuring out just what the continuing significance of the Ten Commandments is in the modern world, and who it applies to, is by no means a simple task. As James suggests, it's an ancient code. And I would suggest, it represents not the "divine word" on every dimension of human behavior, but rather a very human attempt to translate and understand what they felt God was calling them to do and be in their own specific time and place. It's also not at all clear to whom the Ten Commandments was intended to apply. Certainly it can be read as a set of universal moral principles, but it's far more likely that it was originally understood by the Israelites to embody their specific and particular covenant with their God. Thus, while one can glean universal moral principles from it (e.g., don't murder, don't steal again), that was probably not how it was originally intended.

As a Christian ethicist, a large part of what I do is attempt to understand just what the continuing relevance of the Christian tradition is to the moral problems facing the world today. The Bible is one of the sources to which I refer, not because it presents me with a list of infallible moral rules, but because I understand myself to be attempting to follow in my own context the same God that Jesus followed, and that the ancient Israelites followed in their own times and places. And just as the Biblical law was reinterpreted and reunderstood in different contexts throughout the Bible, so too we need to understand how God is speaking to us in this time and place, and what God is calling us to do and to be here and now. We read the Bible, not because it gives us answers, but because it helps us understand how others have framed the question, in confrontation with the same God we seek to follow.

[The Seven Precepts are] less about mocking (in my opinion) and more about how these values, which were essentially whipped up in a hurry, seem to contain more compassion than a list where nearly half of the commandments require everyone worship a particular deity and has been used by politicians to push Christian beliefs into policy decisions.

The "Satanic" aspect is the least important part. It could've been written by some dude in his basement. The point is: If it's so easy to come up with a set of worthwhile values, why do some people insist on putting up the Ten Commandments on public property instead?

Now, on the one hand, I'm no more in favor of attempts to plaster the Ten Commandments in every conceivable place than Hemant is. I tend to think they serve the same civic function as other ancient codes of law do -- to remind us that we are law-giving and law-obeying people. This, I take it, is the reason why it's carved on the Supreme Court building: Not because it's intended to be the foundational law of a democratic republic (which it emphatically is not), but because it represents a paradigm case of "law making as civilization making" and helps to remind us that we are a nation of laws. This is a far cry from the conservative Christian attempts to emblazon them everywhere as a testimony to the fact that we are a "Christian nation" (funny though, they aren't nearly as eager to do that with the Beatitudes).

However, I think Hemant doesn't really realize the import of what he's saying. Of course a set of moral precepts designed by modern, western, secular people (whether "whipped up in a hurry" or not) is going to appeal to modern, western, secular people. These rules are less normative in that sense than they are descriptive. They tell us what we as a liberal society already believe (and again, this has quite literally nothing to do with Satan, as he himself notes). It's not much of a moral challenge to tell people to do what they are already inclined to do anyway. For those of us who believe that we are called to a morality that transcends mere attempt to reflect who are are back to ourselves however, there is a much greater challenge: To try and relate our moral responsibilities here and now to the transcendent reference point that we strive to approximate in our specific time and place, and who we believe is testified to in a set of texts that is emphatically not of our time and place.

How this is to be done is not an easy task, and it's not a task that I need the Satanic Temple or Hemant Mehta to sign on for. But for me and those who work within my tradition, it is the central moral task, and again I would simply define it in this way (following James Gustafson): "What is God enabling and requiring us to do and be in this particular time and place."

And if I were to reconfigure the Ten Commandments in such a way as to help me answer that, I could certainly not do better than the words of Jesus: "To love God above all things, and to love your neighbor as yourself."